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Are the millions of dollars and thousands of hours of technical assistance to states of the former Soviet Union appropriately focused to deliver the best return on investment? This article examines two prominent concepts in vogue among technical assistance agencies and applies them to the specific area of local government budget reforms in Poland and Ukraine. Clear definitions lead to specific measures that can improve democratic accountability in former Soviet Union states.

Everyone wants accountability in education. Presidents want to hold the states and school districts accountable. The governors and state legislators want to hold the districts and schools accountable. School superintendents want to hold principals and teachers accountable. Parents want to hold their children's schools and teachers accountable. Whenever a class or a school or a district fails to live-up to someone's expectations, he or she wants to hold somebody else accountable.

Everyone wants to be an accountability holder. Few want to be an accountability holdee. For the accountability holders always get to punish the accountability holdees.

Our concept of educational accountability is a vestige of the industrial model of education: At age five, the raw materials (a.k.a., the children) are delivered to the plant door by their parents; after thirteen years, they emerge, at high-school graduation, as finished products. The teachers are the production workers, the principals are the shop foremen, and the superintendents are the plant managers. And if their products aren't up to our standards, someone in the production process should be held accountable.

But why not hold parents accountable? Why not hold students accountable? Why not hold legislators, civic leaders, citizens, and taxpayers accountable? Why not discard as obsolete our linear, unidirectional, hierarchical concept of accountability and replace it with a web of mutual and collective responsibility, in which each of us accepts that we all have a responsibility for improving education?

This comment on Jones and Thompson (2000) draws on extensive and largely invisible secondary regulation to suggest that the strategy designed into New Zealand’s responsibility budgeting and accounting system seems to be privatization. It also explains that government departments are quasi-investment centers, with chief executives held responsible for assets but prevented from being able to replace assets by resource-eroding processes designed into the system. Because New Zealand’s financial management system has evolved over time and much of that evolution has been through secondary regulation, the need for careful attention to current sources of information is emphasized.

In January 2000 the United Nations Security Council made history by holding a meeting that equated a health issue to a global security concern. The heath issue was the spread of HIV/AIDS across Africa. The security concern was the destabilization of the African continent by the disease. Analyzing how countries such as Uganda have managed their HIV/AIDS epidemics provides insight into how multi-actor networks that span local, national, and international levels of response are deployed to offset such transnational crises. These types of studies also offer students of public administration and international relations an opportunity to build theoretical bridges between their disciplines by linking theories on state hollowing to those that focus on the contours of nation-state sovereignty.